FRIDAY ROUNDUP

I spend a large chunk of time every morning cruising the bloggerhood, trying to get a take on the pulse of America (and avoiding actually doing any work for as long as possible!)

There is quite the diverse group of writers out here with some noteworthy posts and while this is not by any means a complete list, I thought I’d give a h/t to some of those I found most interesting this week.

First H/T to Time for his expose on a story that our resident cephlapods haven’t yet mentioned. Hmm, could it be they are trying to hide their darker side?

One of my favorite daily reads is Blog d’ Elisson where you will sometimes find something strange, maybe something gross, but always something entertaining. Whatever you find, I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Libby over at The Impolitic (my real life older sister, BTW) is keeping an eye on all the doings across the political spectrum and leaves no stone unturned. Go on over and get your daily dose.

Over at Who Highjacked Our Country, the posts run more like a forum and usually spark some lively debate – today’s topic; healthcare reform.

Also posting on healthcare reform with a slightly different viewpoint is the ever civil Jennifer at Thinking Out Loud. While you may not agree with everything posted there, please be respectful when commenting; it’s that kind of blog.

TAO at A Radical Perspective also has an excellent post on healthcare reform, so don’t miss it.

James’ Muse at Music & Musings has done an interesting post with a different twist on illegal immigration and will no doubt be generating spirited debate for days.

Shaw at Progressive Eruptions has done a most exemplary job covering everything Sotomayor.

And finally, Matt at Osborne Ink has a thorough and informative post on Zero-Sum Republicans. Go see him, but Matt, if you read this, FYI, still can’t post comments at your place so you need to keep working on that new format.

My apologies to anyone I’ve missed, but I DO have to go to work some time!

Hell no, he won't go!

Quite frankly the idea that our military has become an evangelical camp-meeting scares me more that the Obama presidency scares the people who think he's a Muslim secret agent or that the Hawaii Bureau of Vital Statistics cooked up a fake birth certificate and the Honolulu newspapers recorded his birth forty some odd years ago as part of a plot to make Baby Obama the future president. It's not just theBiblically deluded nature of such people but also the uncontrollable urges they have to believe things for reasons hard for others to understand.

It's hard to know whether U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook really believes the fantasy or whether he simply doesn't want to go to Afghanistan and couldn't bring himself to wear a dress. I would have to assume that he does believe. He claims that he has tremendous support from fellow soldiers -- 90% is his frightening claim.

He would get on the next plane says he if only it could be proved that his birth certificate was real. That's a remarkable statement and if birth certificates needed to be proved beyond establishing that the birth was properly registered, we could easily disallow every president. Quite a can of worms, this is and perhaps it's better to ask for some evidence that, like John McCain, he wasn't born in the USA. Of course there isn't any evidence beyond that malignant viral meme that seems to spread from loony to loony like lice in a flop house.

Of course it isn't just the loons and psychos keeping the idea alive. one of the favorite tricks of our scandal addicted media is to presentnasty, stale old memes in new bottles and so we often have Fox hinting that "people are saying" when they aren't and we have Lou Dobbs, fresh out of stories about the Mexican Menace saying "new questions are being raised." No they're not, Lou, it's the same insane calumny coming from yet another psycho. and shame on you for trying to keep the meme alive for fame and profit.

Of course and as we expected, a Federal judge threw the case out this morning and the Federal dumpster already contains the smelly remnants of other similar suits, but thanks to Lou and Fox and the Army of Believers the idea will survive and perhaps longer than our republic. It's not completely new of course, Clinton faced opposition from some in the military based on some some notion that he wasn't really the President. What does it tell us, I have to ask, that the notion that the SCOTUS decision to stop counting ballots in Florida and the serious evidence of voting machine fraud made W's presidency illegitimate has faded away? Maybe it tells us that the great ship of insanity lists heavily to the right. New questions are being raised, you know -- and people are saying.

SOP

It would be hard to substantiate a claim that the United States of America hasn't been a country safe from foreign invasion, at least since the war of 1812 ended, although politicians have been shouting "danger" and starting profitable wars to ward it off for a long time. Even during the infamous first year of this new millennium, more people died of influenza in the US than in the World Trade Center; more than ten times as many on the highway. There's no money in perspective however and there's no safety for the Republican party in it either and so we still have dishonest intellectual lightweights like Liz Cheney claiming that "We" have kept the country safe since September 11, 2001 by launching the second most expensive war in US history and torturing prisoners while essentially refusing to do a damned thing about the surviving perpetrators.

Her crime boss father may or may not be able to keep a straight grimace telling us tall ones like that, but she is and although she has no way of knowing much of anything (unless the old man has been giving away State secrets,) she claims that getting close to Cheney's crimes is demoralizing the CIA which is putting us all in further danger, danger, danger. Yes, the bogeyman will crash more planes into New York if we try to prove that her father broke the law by authorizing torture, lying to Congress and a host of other unprecedented crimes.

The evidence however is that the CIA isn't demoralized at all, but of course we have Fox and Friends to further the fallacy as they always do. It's their own private sector version of Screwing America for Profit, or from the viewpoint of the GOP, it's SOP.

Lizard-Musings about the Way We Live Now

First: the last few decades suggest that we want the benefits of a modern, advanced society but we refuse to align our governmental practices and our tax base with that desire. We want things for which we (especially the middle and upper classes) have no intention of ever paying. The services we want are good things to have (access to health care, for instance) and in my view there's no problem with government at all levels being part of implementation; the trouble is that we refuse to pay for what we want. This is a problem that really could sink the republic: when government fails to deliver the goods demanded, Americans may then turn to extremists who make wild promises and promptly forget all about them when they attain power. Rich as we are collectively, it seems as if the slice of our material means that we are willing to dedicate to the social goods we want isn't sufficient.

Or consider the following if you don't like the above argument about percentages: neither do we seem very resourceful in finding ways to come up with the necessary money without resorting to painful taxation – how about doing away with most components of "the war on drugs," at least insofar as that benighted effort focuses on possession and use of marijuana? (I don't use the stuff – never have; I just don't consider its use socially destructive, especially compared with alcohol. And I don't say this in wide-eyed innocence of the so-called drug culture: hard drugs like heroin and meth leave a trail of individual and collective destruction in their wake. They should not simply be legalized.) My guess is that refraining from such foolish, doomed pursuits would net us a sum in the tens of billions per year, perhaps enough to pay for a huge chunk of our health-care needs. Furthermore, if we simply adopted the philosophy that only the violent and otherwise most despicable of offenders belong in a cage, we could save an even greater sum. Spending thousands to try and then incarcerate someone for stealing a few items from a convenience store makes no sense whatsoever – surely there are better ways to deal with such bad behavior without condoning it. Our obsession with such nonsense stems less from stinginess and antigovernmentalism than from a failure of both common sense and compassion, and it costs us dearly. And I'm not even considering the elephant in the room, our military spending habits – I am all for a strong and thoroughly modern military, but we spend as if we are preparing for a combined full-scale Klingon - Borg invasion.

Second: the federal legislative branch is scarcely up to the task of dealing with the above problems of social will. Cloture in the Senate has gone from an occasional procedural tactic to a deadly weapon wielded by the minority party against the hopes of the majority. Those of us who live in California are now suffering through an extreme version of this debility: it takes a 2/3 vote in California to pass a budget. And since it's almost impossible to attain a 2/3 majority in today's polarized environment, nothing can be done most of the time. There are a few procedural tricks, but evidently they don't work very well. The Governator and the Republicans refuse to raise taxes in a time of recession (which is understandable), and the Democrats are set against gutting education and key social programs (also understandable). So here we are, waiting for inveterate opponents to come together and agree to a compromise they both loathe. We are now issuing IOU's that the major banks no longer want to redeem before maturity. The more fragmented and uncivil towards one another we become, the more damaging are all demands for legislative supermajorities.

My question, then, is as follows: might it best suit a weakened republic (one perhaps, alas, in a period of decline?) to quicken its upper legislative branch, making it a 51/49 proposition to pass legislation in both houses? Or at to least make cloture a 55/45 or 53/47 proposition? We need to do some big things in near-desperate times, and the way congress presently works, I'm not confident that we can do them, Big Al and Old Arlen notwithstanding. It is well and good to imagine wise men in periwigs playing the role of Lords to a mercurial House, but I'm not convinced that the Senate, as it now behaves, won't be the republic's ruin. What do you think? Is 60/40 cloture antiquated, or sort of like giving a box of loaded rifles to a roomful of lunatics? Or is it still possible within that constraint for an effective president to do some old-fashioned LBJ-style bully-pulpiting, arm-twisting and wheeler-dealing, thereby getting some big things done when he knows he has nearly 2/3 of the people on his side?

Guys like us

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played!
Songs that made the Hit Parade.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days!

We should worry. There are doubts. We don't know enough about her. She's "ethnic" and therefore might have "empathy" for other ethnics and therefore she might be prejudiced against us - and lets face it she's dangerous because we can't know how people like that think. Do we want someone with a special social or gender or ethnic perspective instead of a regular American anyway? It's not that we're prejudiced, it's that she probably is because, well you know. . . aren't they all?

And you knew where you were then.
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Change the "she" to a "he" and you have the same whiny, timorous Archie Bunker mentality that assured us their fear and loathing of Obama had nothing to do with the fact that he was a Ni -- I mean African American.

Turn on C-Span this morning and you have the same white collar bigotry from the same, expensively dressed, white Anglo-Saxon senators from the same tradition and the same party that fought school segregation, supported restricted real estate markets and hotels and caressed their bibles while telling us it was and should be a felony to marry outside your race. The same people whose family values trump yours, who want you to affirm their religion regardless of what you believe, who would never, however be so rude as to use a racial epithet whenblackballing you from the club. The same tailored suits who pretend to solemn deliberation to hide their knee-jerk prejudice. She's just not suitable, not one of us, don't you know old chap. It's nothing personal.

A wise Latina woman? Not at my country club, not on my court.

Didn't need know welfare state.
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days!

RETURN OF (O)CT(O)PUS

Last week, Octopus took time off to explore the western shores of the Florida peninsula and visit the sponge docks of Tarpon Springs, a quaint fishing village originally settled by Greek divers over a century ago.

The way Florida hangs off the contiguous 48 states makes one wonder why this land is considered “florid” when a more apt descriptor should be “flaccid.”

To traverse the state, most Flaccidians take Interstate 4 that connects Daytona on the east coast to Tampa on the west. However cephalopods are water-bound creatures and land routes are not an option. I took the seaward route around the southernmost tip where the infamous River of Crass flows into Flaccida Bay. There I found this:


Clean, spacious, stupidity-free, and ready to move-in, it appears to be a perfect place to start a family with plenty of room to raise 200,000+ octopod fries at one time … all destined to become liberal bloggers!

There are ships in bottles, but Blue Moon is a treasure-trove of empty bottles inside a ship … beer, wine, and gin discards in assorted colors and sizes. Empty bottles are important to Octopods because we prefer them to beds. Perhaps this is a throwback to our univalve days when we carried our abode everywhere.

All I need now is to find a calmly mimic octopus for a mate. Why a mimic octopus, you ask? Even among the most faithful of cephalopods, la diversité est le sel de la vie.

Home from the sea

After days of overcast skies, it was refreshing to be awoken by sunlight streaming through a porthole on a bright Sunday morning. It was hardly refreshing to watch the usual Sunday TV Godblathering over breakfast. The Something Or Other ministries was appealing for last minute funds to fight the coming national disaster: the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, who would, because she is ethnic and her record notwithstanding, bias the court in favor of Hispanics in direct contradiction to God's will. It's nice to live in a country where such bigots get special tax status because they wave Bibles now and then, even if it's only to bludgeon people with.

We cast off and pulled out into the Intra-Coastal waterway just in time to wait 15 minutes for the Atlantic Avenue bridge to open and looking around the cloudless sky, I spotted something I haven't seen for a while - a skywriter. U + GOD was soon spread against the sky like an idiot screaming from a window.

An hour later. with an extra hundred gallons in the tanks and some $330 poorer; we were booming out of the Lake Worth inlet at 22 knots into the open and turquoise sea. It felt almost like an escape into a fresh, clean and fragrant world -- and not an easy one with all the small fishing boats who seem to think the middle of a shipping channel is a perfect place to spend the morning fishing. Switch on the radar, check the proper waypoints on the chart plotter and push the red button on the auto-pilot. Heading due North, the blue hull cuts through the swells and we're free of the land and its barbarism for a while.

If only it were as easy to escape the smell of religion, the reek of stupidity and the stench of bigotry.

Out of town musings

I'm not the least bit surprised at the Pew poll showing that only 6% of scientists are Republicans. Republicans, at least these days, are all about belief, whether it's in some magical beings and magical places and magical events or magical economic schemes that somehow never seem to be demonstrable. I was told some years ago of a Mensa study indicating that religiosity declined significantly in proportion to IQ, but I can't confirm it.

I was trying out the new digital TV spectrum on Blue Moon this morning. We're some 6o miles south of home port on the Florida coast. I was amazed at the proportion given over to bombastic preachers such as the one trying to "prove" with authoritarian proclamation and a bullying tone, that the first amendment really asserts a Christianist agenda and that secularists, scientists, intellectuals and of course "Liberals" are the enemies of freedom.

Is it just me, or do they sound just like Republicans arguing that they stand for small, cheap and almost impotent government?

Yes, digital broadcasting is a big improvement in terms of picture and number of channels available, but the price we pay is to suffer greater indignities against truth, reason, logic, history, justice and most of all -- freedom of religion. I have to wonder if the age of reason would ever have dawned, even as briefly as it did: i have to wonder if there would have been an American Revolution had the vast majority of militant, authoritarian dullards been able to have such means of expression as technology has given them.

Posted from the Delray Beach Yacht Club

Some Things Never Change!

After several very frustrating weeks, my home network is up and running again. It turned out to be a simple fix but difficult to find.

Many of you know that I work in real estate and so I frequently receive all sorts of professional advertising. I was astounded to find this in my email today.
Remember the Great Mortgage Meltdown that happened a while back… oops, my mistake; that would be the Great Mortgage Meltdown that is still plaguing the real estate market TODAY!?!
People being given mortgages they could barely afford with no money down (read: nothing to lose) and walking away leaving toxic assets all over the country?

Remember government leaders decrying the dastardly money lenders for unsound lending practices and the takeover over of several mortgage companies and banks, including Fannie Mae?

As I pondered the wisdom of a government entity such as the USDA making 102% loans, I could only shake my head and wonder - WTF!?!

No, Mr. Bond -- I expect you to lie

The only creativity coming out of the Republican tribe these days seems to center around new and ever more precious ways to denounce Barak Obama. Still sweating from the effort it took to convince themselves that Obama Supporters see him as the second coming, they're mocking him for not being a messiah.

Take Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) for instance. Hoping you won't remember George Bush's pathetic swoons about looking into Vladimir Putin's eyes and seeing a soul mate, Bond told reporters yesterday that The president's trip to Moscow was a huge pile of shit because nothing was accomplished but an agreement to reduce the huge pile of nukes. Obama should, says Bond, have stopped the repression of the Russian media and commanded them to sanction North Korea if he were a president worth his salt. Obama has simply failed, in one magical moment, to make Russia an obedient, American client state -- as John McCain and Sarah Palin surely would have done with a great flourish of bluster, threat and bravado - and at a lower cost. George Bush? Who?

Posted from Blue Moon,
Port Salerno, Florida